Beauty in the Mundane
by dogbearinggifts
Summary: "Look. I don't know if getting 'em away from their dad would change what happens. Maybe they'll grow up to be just fine and the world'll get hit by an asteroid or a nuke or something. Lot of shit can happen between now and then….But if you want to give 'em a chance to grow up normal, this year's as good as any." Hazel and Agnes help the kids escape Reginald.


_**1997 **_

The world was over.

Hazel couldn't hang onto the thought for long. If he pondered it for more than a few seconds, if he stopped and thought about all the cities and towns and plains and people who were now gone, his head spun the way it did when he drank too much and all four shots hit him at once.

It wasn't over yet, not in the year he and Agnes had jumped to. Late autumn, 1997 had seemed as good a place as any to seek refuge—not so far from the present they'd left to make their clothes stand out and their money unrecognizable, not so close that the apocalypse would loom over everything they did. The year held little significance aside from its status as a rest stop, a place to pause and breathe the air of a planet not yet engulfed in flame and ash.

Knowing it was coming, knowing he had a means of escape, hadn't made the brief glimpse he'd gotten any easier to bear.

Agnes hadn't gone far. She'd found a seat on a flattened rock close to the creek, the sort graduating seniors and happy young couples liked to use for yearbook and engagement photos, if the shows he'd watched were any reflection of reality. She'd adopted the same pose, too—back straight, hands on her knees, head turned slightly to stare out at the water.

For a moment, Hazel simply watched her, watched a cold breeze lift strands of greying blonde hair, watched it bat them around before letting them fall back to her shoulders. The serenity about her, the calm lent by her pose and the breeze and the dappled sunlight across her back—it was an illusion, he knew. Reality had taken a minute or two to hit, but when it did, it seemed enough to knock her flat. Part of him wanted to let her be, but another part couldn't leave her alone. Not again.

Her glance toward him was brief, but not so brief he missed the mingled weariness and despair behind it.

Hazel eased onto the rock beside her. The creek bubbled along, dashing over rocks and mud. How long it had been since he'd sat and listened to that particular melody, he couldn't say.

"Are you sure there's nothing we could do?"

Hazel bit his lip. In the past, he'd have pushed the guilt aside, found some distraction from it—but maybe that wasn't how things ought to be done.

"Not with the time we had," he said after a pause. "We were lucky to get out when we did."

"Maybe we could go back."

"Go back to _what_? Whole damn world's destroyed."

"It can't just…_.end_ like that." Agnes turned, not quite facing him, but closer to it than she had been. "We can go back a—a little earlier, and maybe we can fix it."

"How?"

"Just find the point where everything went wrong, and then set it right. I don't know, there—there's got to be_something_."

_Protect Vanya Hargreeves. _

That was the assignment. Keep Vanya Hargreeves from harm. Vanya was there to end the world, Hazel was there to make sure she didn't run into any trouble along the way. Ensure the bomb went off as intended, try not to notice he too would be caught in the blast.

She was where everything had gone wrong.

_This was supposed to happen. _

He'd rejected that answer. Fought it. Ignored it. Worked around it, when the battle proved fruitless. It should have left his head already, but that old excuse still bubbled up. Hazel couldn't see the logic in it, but then, he'd never tried to see it. He'd simply done as he was told, done it well, and moved on. Onto the next job, the next killing, the next body left in a motel or a bedroom or the middle of the street.

But he wasn't with the Commission anymore. He was with Agnes, and Agnes wouldn't sit by knowing the world would end in twenty-two years.

"Maybe we could jump back a little more. Little further from the end."

"What would that do?"

There was more than simple curiosity in those words, and Hazel knew before he spoke that he'd chosen the wrong train of thought to follow. "I dunno. Give us more time, I guess."

"_We'd_ have more time, but what about everyone else?"

_Definitely_ the wrong train.

"They—" She turned more, facing him, but he didn't move. "Hazel! All of those people are going to _die_in twenty-two years, and you're just gonna let them?"

"I just don't see what we can do, all right?" He looked up, but didn't quite meet her gaze. "Commission wanted the world to end, and they got their wish. They'll do whatever it takes to keep it that way."

"But that lady—the Handler—she's dead. You killed her."

"She's replaceable." Those scars crisscrossing her skin made him wonder just _how_ replaceable, but he wasn't keen to learn for himself. "Now that she's gone, they'll just find somebody else to step in and do what she did."

Agnes lapsed into silence. A bird chirped from the branches above, but she made no move to look toward it.

"She said to protect Vanya Hargreeves."

"Yep."

"Well, if Vanya's the one who—you know, the one who did it? Maybe we could talk to her. Try and get her to—I don't know, do something else?"

"Probably not possible, way she was." Blank expression. Colorless eyes. Striding through the streets with a violin case in her hand. Hazel had seen worse, caused worse, but he already knew that particular sight would pay frequent visits to his nightmares.

"So we go back earlier. A couple of days, or a couple of weeks."

"Don't think that'd be enough."

"I knew her, Hazel. She and her brothers and her sister—they'd come into my donut shop late at night, buy all the donuts they could. Start wolfing 'em down before I could even make change. She was quiet. Shy. Come along behind the rest of 'em like she didn't know if she was allowed to be there." Agnes bit her lip. "Whatever she did when the world ended, that wasn't her."

A number of childhood visits to a donut shop didn't strike him as quite enough to say you'd known a person, but then, Hazel didn't have thirty years of customer service under his belt. Maybe those years had taught Agnes to see things he couldn't. "She was a kid then. People grow up, change."

"Not like that. Something went wrong. Very wrong."

It had never been his job to think too deeply about the _whys_of things. Worker bees weren't paid to think, they were paid to follow orders, do what needed done. A part of him, a voice that sounded an awful lot like the Handler, told him it still wasn't his job. The apocalypse had gone off without a hitch. The world was over. All that was left was to find a peaceful spot somewhere in history and settle down as best they could.

"What do you think it was?"

"I think it was their dad."

Hazel met her gaze this time. Her answer had come with no hesitation, no forethought, as though she'd landed on it years before.

"She wrote a book, you know. Vanya did. Everybody read it, everyone. And the things he'd do to them? To those poor kids?" She closed her eyes, shaking her head. "God. Breaks my heart just thinking about it."

_"They're a real friggin' mess."_Hazel hadn't put much thought into those words back when Cha-Cha said them. He'd heard them, of course, added them to his strategy, but he hadn't paused to think why they were a mess or what that mattered in the grand scheme of things. Hadn't put them together with Five's words about his brother or the other emotionally stunted man-children—his words—he'd returned to.

"You really think that Hargreeves guy screwed 'em up that badly?"

"I do." She sighed again. "I just—I didn't know back then, but if I did? I'd have taken 'em right out of that house. Adopted 'em myself if I had to."

Maybe that was a hint, maybe it wasn't. It seemed a little too heartfelt, a little too sincere to be one, and Hazel hadn't ever explained the fuzziness of time travel to her in detail anyway. He could very well leave her to think that their childhoods were beyond alterations, let her believe that their timeframe in which to change course was far narrower than it was. Maybe she'd realize the lie one day. She probably would realize it one day. But if ducking the Commission meant denying Agnes her peace of mind, then….

Hazel couldn't bring himself to finish that thought.

"You know when they were born?"

"Yes. October First, 1989. All at the same time—I remember that part. It was all over the news for weeks."

"So they'd be—what? Eight now?"

"I think so." She paused. "Are you...?"

He sighed. "Look. I don't know if getting 'em away from their dad would change what happens. Maybe they'll grow up to be just fine and the world'll get hit by an asteroid or a nuke or something. Lot of shit can happen between now and then."

"But?"

Instinct, honed by years with the Commission and approved by their policies, urged him to drop the subject. Change it, follow it to any conclusion beside the one he'd set a course for. But Agnes was here, and Agnes wouldn't want him to go that way, so he drew a breath. He had to say it now, before he had time to talk himself out of it.

"But if you want to give 'em a chance to grow up normal, this year's as good as any."


End file.
